Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Telstar






This post is for Capcom. Last Friday, I met Marty Mundt at the usual place, Clarke's on Belmont. It was raining. I had eggs and hash browns. Marty had a milk shake. Then we got down to business. He drove me up to Andersonville so I could riffle through his books and I left with a lot of swag. Got a ton of James Blish Star Trek pbs from the early 70s, a few hardbacks, one of which only interests me because it contains Larry Niven's "All The Myriad Ways," which I have only read in illustrated form, either in OMNI COMIX or Marvel's UNKNOWN WORLDS OF SCIENCE FICTION.

The coolest thing, and as out of place as an accordion map of Istanbul (which I took in case I could learn something from it for when I email my friend Gulnar Ozturk), was this totally fantastic three-fold of the Telstar project. You guys might remember me posting the YouTube of the eponymous song by The Tornadoes about seven or eight months back. I waved it at Marty, asking him if he was absolutely certain. He nodded and then showed me his wife's Hallowe'en room. Marty also showed me the two vials of my blood and bursa fluid that I gave him and Andrea as a wedding gift. I thought they might have started cloning me already, but the apartment was pretty cramped. Marty then drove me to the Western stop on the Brown Line and I zigzagged along with a total of fifteen books. (Included was a volume of Grant Morrison's run on DOOM PATROL and the first hardback volume of Brian K. Vaughn's Y: THE LAST MAN.) Still hard to believe it was 70 and dropping all that day and then it hit 90 while I was on my way to the Comic-Con 15 hours later. Well, there's the story behind the Telstar phamplet. Of course, the first words reflected from the satellite back into our atmosphere was William Shatner screaming "Spock...Must Die!"